Will Holman is a maker's maker whose HOWTOs have graced Make, Instructables, Readymade and other hotbeds of DIY; his new book Guerilla Furniture Design is a beautifully written and inspiring design manifesto disguised as a project book,Read the rest

Noah Sachs uses the years-long Bangalore garbage crisis to ask some pointed questions about America's secretive waste-disposal industry, which treats the treatment of American waste as a military-grade secret, protected by barbed wire and vicious lawyers.

Bangalore's drowning in rubbish, it's contaminating the water and poisoning the Earth, tens of thousands labor in filthy, unsafe conditions to sort and recover it -- and the average Bangalorean is only generating about one pound of trash per day. Americans throw away seven times that amount, and the fact that it's whisked away doesn't mean it's not a problem. In Sachs's view, the Bangalore situation just makes visible the lurking consequences of America's own profligacy.

Chiron sez, "I'm making an album and music video on Kickstarter, creating music and art from the most powerful tools human kind has ever discarded. Using recycled electronics, you journey into a secret world, with dollhouse-sized scenes filmed inside technology itself, and sounds made almost entirely out of retro computers & video games. E-waste is a huge environmental problem, and so my mission is to inspire artists and musicians around the world to turn the problem into creative artistic solutions. I've got 13 years professional experience in technology as a senior project manager, and this adventure represents the peak of a 5-year labor of love."

Backers pledging to this project can choose rewards, for both people who love listening to music, as well as making it. You can get download and CD versions of the music, and various hardware and software used to make the sounds on the album. This includes software and MIDI hardware for vintage systems, as well as guitar pedals made out of modems and PDP-11 electronics, and art prints featuring scenes from the final music video. Right now there is also a free song and free instruments you can download directly from the Kickstarter page. Everything is designed, built and hand-tested by me and once the project has launched, and after backers get a 6-month head start, I will release everything under an open-source license.

Afate is a Togolese hacker who uses the WoeLab makerspace in Lome, Togo (the first makerspace in west Africa). He's invented a 3D printer made out of the ewaste that is piled high in neighborhood-sized ewaste dumps in Agbogbloshie, near Accra, Ghana. He's raised money on Ulule to standardize the printer, called the W.AFATE, so that anyone can turn ewaste into a 3D printer. The W.AFATE design has already won NASA's Space App challenge with a concept for building trashbot 3D printers on distant planets.

Joris sez, "I interviewed Marek Senický about his Filamaker today. The device is a grinder and filament extruder that recycles waste plastic and turns old unwanted 3D prints into new ones.
I think its amazing and will greatly reduce the cost of 3D printing. Effectively to zero if waste is used [Ed: that's artistic license -- I'm sure Joris is familiar with the second law of thermodynamics]. It will also make 3D printing much greener."

I wrote about Filabot, a competitor of Filamaker, last January. Joris explains the difference: "Filamaker has a grinder and extruder. So it grinds up old 3D prints and turns them into filament. It can also grind up ABS waste products and turn those into filament. So you take any old ABS item and grind it and filament pops out.
The Filabot is only an extruder that takes pellets and turns them into filament."

Time was, we used to recycle old cathode ray tubes from TVs and computer monitors into new ones. Obviously, though, there's no longer a demand for new CRTs — or the specialized leaded glass they're made of. As a result, the last generation of CRTs is piling up into a "glass tsunami", filling storage units and swiftly becoming a liability to the recyclers who used to make money off them.

Filabot, "The Personal Filament Maker" is an ongoing open-source hardware kit project that aims to perfect a plastic grinder/melter that you can use to turn scrap plastic (including failed 3D printouts) into filament that can be fed into 3D printers. It's a promising step towards the blunderbussification of 3D printers, turning them into devices that can use any random junk as ammo for useful work:

The Filabot Reclaimer, is our flagship system, that allows for the already innovative 3D printing movement, to become more self sufficient, experiment with new materials, and recycle bad prints.

The Filabot Reclaimer includes the grinding, extruding, and spooling systems. The Grinder will tear up bottles and can handle up to a good 3in by 3in chunk of plastic. Material from the grinder can either be stockpiled or fed directly into the extruder. From there the extruder will melt and pressurize the molten plastic to push it thought the interchangeable dies. There are two dies included with the Filabot Reclaimer, a 3mm and 1.75mm, depending on the filament size needed. The spool system will automatically roll the filament onto a spool after cooling and sizing.

Over the long run, keeping stuff like tree limbs and compostable waste out of landfills is good for cities. There's only so much space in a landfill and getting more land is extremely expensive. So why haven't more cities hopped on the curbside composting bandwagon, or at least banned yard waste from landfills? There's probably a lot of factors that go into those decisions, but one, apparently, is the influence of large, private companies that handle waste collection and see the diversion of re-usable waste as a detriment to their income. (Via Chris Tackett)

Elizabeth on ifixit tells us the heartwarming story of Robert Litt, a teacher at ASCEND, "a small arts K-8 school in the Alameda County School District." Litt needed a computer lab. His school had no budget, So he called around to local businesses and individuals and collected all their "broken" computers (refusing anything made before 2002 or with less than 512MB of RAM) and installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on them. What he got was a free, robust computer lab. Litt says ""Discarded computers are our most wasted educational resource," and that we are "starving in the midst of plenty."

Faced with inadequate educational technology, few teachers would take it upon themselves to create an entire computer lab with no funding. It’s a daunting task, no doubt. But, Robert argues, it’s within every teacher’s capabilities. He came into the project with absolutely no computer repair or tinkering background. “My background is being a 6th grade teacher,” he says. “I am self-taught 100%.” He used free resources available online and troubleshot as he went along.

Robert advocates open-source software even for schools that aren’t lacking technology. US government reports say the digital divide is shrinking, at least in schools—97% of teachers have at least a single computer in the classroom. Yet that’s not the whole story. “The digital divide is growing in a hidden statistic,” Robert says, “the actual teaching of technology in a meaningful way.” He shows students how to do math on spreadsheets, how to make simple websites, how to put together slide presentations, all on free software. These are the computer skills that, students tell him, they are later expected simply to know. And with the prevalence of recycled computers, there’s no need for even 3% of classrooms to be without computers.

Robert will be moving to a new school this coming Fall, where he hopes to continue teaching technology meaningfully. And he calls on other teachers to do the same: in a digital world, teachers are responsibile for making students “better digital citizens.”

Here's Off-Beat Mama's photos show how you can build your own AT-AT out of empty diaper boxes. What a fantastically shitty idea!

I have a dozen nappies boxes sitting around, and recently decided (whether out of a fit of stay-at-home-mum induced anxiety or just total creativity) to make an AT-AT out of them. My son naturally destroyed it three days later, but once he did I was able to snap a few shots of how I set up the structure in the first place.

Instructables user Jetpack5 created a series of Star Wars space vehicles out of floppy-disk parts and office supplies. There's even a rubber-band-ball Death Star! Also in the set: a Millennium Falcon and a truly spiffy X-Wing fighter. This is a potentially productive way of using up the 5-billion-odd 3.5" floppies kicking around, slowly decaying. Better than my idea of a massive Beowulf cluster of 486s with four floppy drives each, rack-mounted and spanned to create a massively inefficient, room-sized virtual ZIP cartridge, which would be serviced by a dozen rollerbladed teenagers who would whisk around, swapping out corrupt disks.

Netherlands artist Suzanne Jongmans has created a series of portraits in the style of the Dutch Masters, creating the costumes out of soft packing foam sheets. She needs to team up with the artist who creates 15th century Flemish self-portraits using airplane toilet tissue and seat-covers. Together, they will rule the atemporal world.

Referring to both vulnerability and impermanence, I am investigating the texture and feel of both the present and past. Since 2007 I have been working on the series 'foam sculptures': caps and collars, inspired by 16th and 17th century paintings, made from materials currently used for packaging and insulation. This is also an inferior material which is often discarded after use.
By using this material I make a reference to consumerism and the rapid circulation of materials. With these foam sculptures, but also an i-pod, a tattoo and a foot in plaster, we end up in the 21st century.

The portraits are a certain reference to Holbein, Clouet, Vermeer and Holland's Golden Age.
It is no coincidence. In fact, in the 16th and 17th century, laid the foundations for photography.
Call it the prehistory of photography. It appears that the artists have used photographic images, they could not yet capture. In fact, there was the phenomenon of photography so much earlier. This is an atavism of the Golden Age and the early days of the invention of photography.

I use the elements in the present as in the past, the objects in my work are used as symbols
of values. I mutate old costumes into new plastics and old masters in new photographic works.
By using time foreign materials, plastics and techno's, I am creating a time crux, a tension of time.

The Guardian's Deborah Orr is probably right that the Marks and Spencer "shwopping" initiative is "an ugly word for a dubious enterprise", but I am rather taken with this promotion for the program. M&S is encouraging shoppers to "shwop" -- swap their old clothes for discount vouchers when they buy new clothes at M&S, with the old clothes going to charity -- and to promote the affair, they covered this large Truman Brewery warehouse building off Brick Lane with used clothes, to great effect.

Maura, a Missouri high-school student, has a long history of making awesome prom-dresses (there was the goth one, the one made out of Doritos bags, and the one made of pull-tabs). This year, she topped her own impressive achievements with a beautiful dress made of cardboard. She's featured on the "Everything Dresses" site.

The top of the dress is middle part of corrugated cardboard that was peeled apart. If you have ever looked at a cardboard box it is 3 layers, an outer shell on each side with a wavy part in the middle. The wavy part is the top! Maura then spray painted the pieces and painted glitter on top. Everything is glued together with wood glue and hot glue. And no prom dress would be complete without a corset back!
The bottom of the dress proved to be the challenge on this project as it was made of paper bags, and then spray painted, with a zipper in the back.

A monkey sculpture is pictured on a pick-up truck before it is placed in an exhibition at Hiriya recycling park, built on the site of a former garbage dump near Tel Aviv. The Coca-Cola Recycled Safari featuring animals made of recycled Coca Cola packages will be open to the public during the Passover holiday.

More images of other critter creations from the recycling project, below. (REUTERS/Nir Elia)